Sonia Sotomayor made history in August
2009 when she became the first Hispanic
justice to be appointed to the Supreme
Court—and one of only four women
appointed to the Court in its 224-year
history. But what role have gender and
ethnicity really played in Supreme Court
decisions over the years?
Until recently, that would have been a
very difficult question to answer, since
legal scholars have traditionally taken a
case-by-case approach relying on textual
analysis, making big-picture trends very
difficult to see. But with the increasing
use of data and digital methods for
conducting and presenting research
in a variety of fields, that is changing.
Pratt School of Information and Library
Science (SILS)Associate Professor Debbie
Rabina and Assistant Professor Chris
Sula are leading the way in developing
visual tools to help legal scholars and the
broader public spot trends in Supreme
Court rulings over time.
Their first such project, Visualizing the
First Amendment, applies empirical
methods and visualization techniques
to create interactive data-driven visualizations of Supreme Court rulings on
cases involving First Amendment rights.
“We decided to focus on Supreme Court
cases because they establish precedent,”
says Rabina.
The project provides a new examination and understanding of the First

Amendment by visualizing the key
components of its historic development
on both quantitative and qualitative levels.
The project’s interactive website features
a timeline of seminal Supreme Court
cases involving the First Amendment; a
case browser that allows legal researchers
to filter selected First Amendment cases
by criteria such as specific keywords,
rights asserted, or chief justice; statistical
visualizations that use a Supreme Court
database, which records over 60 variables
on each case, to examine patterns and
trends in the history of the Court; and a
citation network that looks at the conceptual structure of the law by visualizing
citations between Court opinions.

“Data visualization is
about trying to find
hidden patterns.”
— Chris Alen Sula
The impetus for the project came about
when students in Rabina’s information
policy class began noticing discrepancies
in the awarding, rescinding, and interpretation of First Amendment rights
and began looking for commonalities.
For example, in Olmstead vs. United
States (1928), the court determined that
wiretapping a person’s home without
a warrant was not a violation of the
Constitution. Forty years later in Katz vs.

United States (1967), the court ruled that
wiretapping a phone booth outside of a
suspected criminal’s home did violate
First Amendment rights. Did the change
in the Court’s ruling reflect a trend
and, if so, what were the ramifications
of this shift? When Sula, whose areas of
expertise include information visualization and interactive technology, joined
the SILS faculty in 2011, he and Rabina
teamed up to use these techniques to help
answer such questions and reveal deeper
legislative trends surrounding the First
Amendment.
“Data visualization is about trying to find
hidden patterns,” says Sula. By using
digital tools to visualize legal content,
Sula and Rabina aim to advance legal
scholarship and increase public access
to legal history. “The visual nature of
this project allows users ranging from
law experts to members of the public
to engage with First Amendment data—
searching for patterns, observing trends
in legal interpretation, and developing a
deeper understanding of constitutional
freedoms.
Visualizing the First Amendment is scheduled to launch this fall at visualfa.org. Sula
anticipates that the methods and systems
developed for the project will serve as a
model for future visual legal scholarship.